The World Wide Web may be thought of as a distributed data store comprising billions of data content items through the Internet. Search engines are commonly used to search the content items available on computer networks, such as the World Wide Web, to enable users to locate content items of interest. A typical search engine is capable of accessing the plurality of web pages, hypertext documents, and other content items from the Internet or other network through use of a crawler.
To use search engine, a user of a client device typically enters one or more search terms or keywords comprising a query. The search engine thereafter identifies one or more content items responsive to the one or more search terms or keywords comprising a received query. The content items identified by the search engine may be combined to form a result set that is displayed to the user with which the query originated.
The content items identified by a search engine as responsive to a query received from a user may include one or more advertisements. Advertisements are commonly used on the Internet to promote various products and services. Advertisements may comprise banner ads, links to web pages, images, video, text, etc. The various advertisements used to promote products on the Internet may be displayed according to a variety of formats, such as in conjunction with a ranked result set in response to a query, embedded in a web page, a pop-up, etc. The advertisements displayed to a user of a client device may be selected, directly or indirectly redirecting the user to a website providing the advertised product or service.
Advertisements identified as responsive to a query received from a given user are typically maintained in one or more data stores, such as databases or servers, and are associated with one or more keywords. A search engine may perform a search of one or more data stores to identify the one or more advertisements associated with one or more keywords that match or are similar to the one or more terms comprising a given user query.
Current techniques for selecting advertisements responsive to a given query require the advertisements to exist at the time a given query is received. If a search engine is unable to identify advertisements responsive to a given query at the time the query is received, the user with which the query originated may not be presented with an advertisement, even though advertisements responsive to the query may become available hours, days, weeks, or months after the query was received.
Current techniques for selecting advertisements responsive to user queries thus fail to provide advertisements that may be responsive to queries that were previously generated by users. In order to overcome shortcomings associated with existing techniques for selecting advertisements responsive to user queries, the present invention provides systems and methods for identifying advertisements that are responsive to queries previously generated by a given user.